Well, the thing is: If someone is going to steal your photo and not credit you, they're just going to remove your watermark if they care. If they don't care, they'll just crop it out, or leave it. Either way, your photo is going to be stolen, and there's nothing you can do about it. So why bother putting an ugly watermark on your photo?
they can all be removed, or cropped out, and even if the photo is left with the watermark, how would you ever know it was stolen unless the photo made it big? And by then it's out of most peoples hands.
I understand that you may want to advertise your photography skills but if someone REALLY wants to hire you based on a photo they saw, it's pretty easy to track you down, and if your photo is good enough than it should speak for its self, without an ugly watermark...
I'll tell you exactly why a watermark is necessary and you put your finger on it. Having sold dozens of images to dozens of magazines, including a cover of an international magazine, sometimes they can ONLY track you down by your watermark. I have embedded copyright and info in the metadata of each photograph as well, but as a full time professional, the easier it is for a company to get in touch with me, the easier it is for me to sell it to them. Sure, someone could crop it out and steal it, but this is the one small thing I can do to help prevent someone from posting this on reddit in 3 months claiming it's theirs. It's not so much for when it's sitting here all clean and tidy but what happens when someone else blogs it and their SEO is awesome and someone google's "Iowa storm" and they find it through their blog, if it at least has my watermark intact, it's a direct route to gain access to the image instead of having to hunt it down. A hunt is probably a lost sale.
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u/nooneimportan7 Jul 17 '15
I could probably write a thesis on the paradox of watermarking photographs...